Prosecutors for embattled Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros said in a court filing late Tuesday that while mistakes were made in the now-defunct “Broadview Six” case against immigration protesters, corrective measures have since been taken and there is no evidence of vindictive prosecution that would warrant further hearings or sanctions.
“This case involved irregularities during a time of immense pressure, upheaval, and emotion in the district because of Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors said in the long-awaited 52-page motion, which detailed how the office has already been publicly rebuked by the court and had experienced prosecutors put under intense “public and private scrutiny.”
The filing said “robust root-cause changes” have been implemented involving the handling of grand jury matters, including an ongoing review of minutes from as many as 1,000 grand jury proceedings dating back to 2007.
In a rare mea culpa, the U.S. attorney’s office also acknowledged in the filing that it could have been more candid with U.S. District Judge April Perry when it came to redacting large portions of the grand jury transcripts handed over in the Broadview case.
Those redactions ultimately revealed what U.S. District Judge April Perry described as blatant misconduct by the lead prosecutor — and a failing of the “presumption of regularity” that normally exists between the court and the government.
While defense attorneys have asked for a hearing on sanctions and the appointment of special counsel to look into possible contempt charges, the U.S. attorney’s office said in the filing that the court’s message “has been clearly heard and there is no need to do more.”
“The Office has not taken lightly this Court’s statement about losing trust. It prompted the United States Attorney to personally address the Court,” the filing said. “… The Government’s various actions are a sincere effort to endeavor to restore the judiciary’s, defense bar’s, and public’s confidence in the Office’s grand jury and other practices and proceedings.”
The U.S. attorney’s take on the matter, which was expected, comes nearly two and a half months after the Broadview Six case collapsed days before trial and led to a scandal that is still having repercussions at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, including calls from many local Democrats for Boutros’ resignation.
The fallout continued Wednesday morning when U.S. District Judge John Kness canceled the upcoming insider trading trial of a former cannabis company executive amid an ongoing request for grand jury materials in that case, which was indicted by the same panel that heard the Broadview Six presentation.
In court, attorney Patrick Blegen, who represents former Verano Vice President Anthony Marsico, cited the Tuesday night filing in the Broadview case in describing the “somewhat unusual situation” at Chicago’s federal courthouse.
“New things are becoming public every day. … I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I have never seen anything remotely close to this,” said Blegen, who has asked for the indictment against Marsico to be dismissed as a result.
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So far, there has been no indication that any wrongdoing occurred in Marsico’s case.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the former Broadview defendants have two weeks to respond to the prosecution filing, and Perry could rule anytime thereafter.
Attorney Christopher Parente, who represents former Broadview defendant Brian Straw, said in a statement Wednesday that Boutros’ office “has made it its job to avoid transparency and accountability” at every turn of the case.
”This latest filing only raises more questions, and we will continue pursuing answers in the interest of justice,” Parente said.
If Perry does go forward with public hearings, it would escalate the already unprecedented turmoil for Chicago’s storied U.S. attorney’s office, with high-level staff members, including potentially Boutros himself, being forced to answer questions under oath about their actions in the Broadview case.
Attorneys for the Broadview Six have believed since the get-go that the decision to indict the group of local Democratic activists for allegedly impeding an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s vehicle during a Sept. 26 protest was politically motivated amid pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to make an example of them.
Boutros, who was first appointed in March 2025 by then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, has publicly denied bringing any cases for political reasons. In an interview in March to mark his first year on the job, he bristled when asked about that very perception, jabbing a finger on the table and telling reporters for the Tribune and Sun-Times “you should write this down.”
“There’s not a single case involving politics in our decision-making, full stop period,” he said then. “Zero. And anyone who says otherwise is misstating reality, and anyone who says otherwise is an armchair expert who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, period. And I don’t need to say anything else on that.”
The filing by Boutros’ office Tuesday shed little additional light on that issue. But in one footnote, prosecutors acknowledged that there was a “virtual meeting” on Sept. 26 — the day of the Broadview incident — between U.S. Justice Department lawyers in Washington, D.C., the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office and other federal law enforcement agencies to discuss issues of violence against immigration officers. In that meeting, a video of the clash in Broadview was played, according to the filing.
“Moreover, as would be expected in the normal course, there were discussions between the Office and Main Justice regarding such things as case updates, especially given the publicity the case generated after it had been charged,” the prosecution filing stated. “These privileged discussions are not only permitted but are contemplated.”
The filing also revealed that five days after the first grand jury session in the Broadview case on Oct. 9 — which ended with a rare “no bill” from the panel — Boutros was emailed a transcript of the proceedings, indicating that it was being closely watched in the office. But the filing said Boutros was “quite certain” he didn’t review the transcript at the time.
On Oct. 16, two days after Boutros was emailed the copy, his prosecutors went back to the same grand jury to try again, leading to at least two skeptical jurors being kicked off the panel, including one who called the case “a crock of s—.” That session again ended without an indictment being filed.
Prosecutors alleged the defendants were part of a group that surrounded an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle outside the Broadview facility during a Sept. 26 protest and “banged aggressively” on the vehicle’s side and back windows, hood and doors, and crowded together to impede the vehicle. The initial indictment charged them each with a count of felony conspiracy that could have brought up to three years in prison.
When the trial was pending earlier this year, federal prosecutors vehemently denied any political motivation for the charges and said the insinuation of any collaboration with the White House was “the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation.”
Perry initially had denied the defense’s request for any emails or other communications Boutros’ office may have had with officials in Washington, saying she trusted prosecutors when they said that no such records existed. She also said it wasn’t “appropriate” to order the U.S. attorney’s office to “report exactly how it went about its searches.”
“The prosecutors know how to do their jobs,” Perry said in her ruling in April. “They know that their law licenses in this case are on the line if they do them inappropriately. I am not going to micromanage the specific way they go about the search.”
On the day the Broadview Six case collapsed, May 21, Perry told the prosecution team that she’d relied on them as officers of the court because their “sole goal is to do justice.”
“I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing,” Perry said. “That trust has been broken.”
Since then, defense attorneys have renewed their request for any “documents, communications and records,” including emails, texts and cellphone data, between members of Boutros’ office and top officials in the Trump administration, including acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche and his top deputy, Aakash Singh.
Singh, who is responsible for coordinating with the 93 U.S. attorneys across the country to advance the president’s law enforcement priorities, has been shown to have micromanaged other immigration-related prosecutions around the same time as Midway Blitz.
Earlier this year, a federal judge in Tennessee ruled Singh was at the center of the vindictive prosecution against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was charged with human trafficking after embarrassing the Trump administration over his wrongful deportation to El Salvador.
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Records made public in Abrego Garcia’s case showed Singh exchanged dozens of detailed emails and texts with top-line prosecutors in Tennessee about the status of that highly political investigation, including one telling the then-acting U.S. attorney in Tennessee: “I appreciate you … and your teams pushing on this. It’s a top priority for us.”
Aside from the grand jury issues with Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, who’d been a prosecutor in the Broadway Six case, Perry has made it clear that she found it more disturbing that prosecutors had tried to hide the wrongdoing from her by redacting large portions of the grand jury transcript before turning it over to her for inspection, which she had to do just days before the trial at the insistence of defense attorneys.
The day the charges were dismissed, Perry had ordered any prosecutors and supervisors involved in the redactions to appear before her. When the closed-door hearing began, the three members of the trial team, Assistant U.S. Attorneys William Hogan, Matthew Skiba and Andres Almendarez, were there, but neither Boutros nor any members of the front office showed up. Hogan told the judge that Skiba had been out of town when the redactions were made.
“All right, so it is you two who looked at the transcript and made a decision about what would be redacted? And only you two?” Perry asked Hogan and Almendarez.
“Yes, mostly me,” Hogan replied. “I’ll take responsibility for it.”
Hours later, Boutros appeared in open court to dismiss the case. In doing so, he defended the trial team, saying they believed the judge had asked for only the portion of the grand jury transcript where jurors were instructed on the law, also known as the session “minutes.”
“I truly do believe that all of these prosecutors here, no one acted with the intent to mislead your honor,” Boutros said.
Defense attorneys, meanwhile, argue that with issues that likely go up to the highest levels of the Department of Justice, the only way to get to the truth is through the appointment of independent special counsel with subpoena power.
“The public trust cannot and will not be restored by anything less,” the defense said in a recent court filing.
At the hearing in the Marsico case Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jared Hasten said that under his office’s new policy of transparency, he was collecting transcripts from the seven or eight grand jury sessions that led to that indictment so the judge could look them over, even though he said he had no reason to believe there were any issues.
Judge Kness, however, said he was struggling with the idea that it should be put on judges to decide whether the grand jury proceedings were tainted or not. He asked if it would be more efficient to provide the information to the defense.
“I have some hesitancy in saying it’s an appropriate role of the judge to be fed a bunch of documents and look at it and say ‘Yeah, there’s an issue here,'” Kness said. “This seems to me to be issue spotting.”
Hasten said that while his office was attempting to address the issues raised by the Broadview case, they were not “waiving wholesale” the custom of grand jury secrecy and turning over transcripts to the defense “whenever they ask.”
Blegen, the attorney for Marsico, said it was the U.S. attorney’s office’s own missteps that have brought on the situation.
“I would suggest it is well-earned,” he said.